Building and blogging

It’s a shame I didn’t discover the Rejuvenation projects blog earlier. So much has happened that I could have told you about. Today we’re building interior walls and hiring a plumber, but it all got started several years ago when I drove up a gravel road, prodded on by a realtor’s sign. At the end of the road was an idyllic Rocky Mountain setting of ponderosa pine, white firs and oak brush surrounded by hills and rocky outcrops. A cheap plastic double-wide disgraced it. In my mind, like a deja vu experience, the faint image of a ranger station, perhaps like those I’d seen as a child in the Northwest, fogged out the trailer. And that settled it. We could afford the place because its well was an 800-foot deep dry hole and it was outside the boundaries of the nearest municipal water system.

Many months and fruitless AutoCAD drawings later, including the novel but highly impractical idea of a hybrid straw-bale/log house, we brought home from a trip a picture of the 1930s Valley Creek Ranger Station in Stanley, Idaho (now a museum). Its wrap-around, hip-roofed back door porch and smallish-diameter logs were the starting point for a workable all-log plan.

Valley Creek Ranger Station in Stanley, Idaho

Onto the rear I tacked a low-ceilinged cabin like one we’d rented at Grand Teton National Park. That became a bedroom. Another addition, a dining porch with windows all around, derived from forest fire lookouts.

Actual building commended a year and a half ago with John and the skidsteer stuck in our mudhole I mean excavation. We’d hit groundwater and it cost us an unbudgeted $20,000 to overdig and refill with hauled-in material.

Then, just as we were scrambling to get the newly-built log shell dried in before the first big winter snow, I turned up very ill. Many months went by with little or no work being done on the house. When he was not at his firefighter job in a town two hours away, John took care of me as I crawled and sobbed through the endless treatment, speculating, in the days when I wasn’t too miserable to even care,  whether I’d survive the doctoring to live in the  house.

I did, and we’ve made progress this year. Following the part-time do-it-yourself program, chinking took from May to the end of August. John won a “nice job” comment from a building inspector who came out to approve the chimney chase full of metal pipe for assorted wood stoves, both heating and cooking types.

Blizzard Gulch "Ranger Station" in September 2009

In the pursuit of interior items appropriate for the rustic vintage house that this is supposed to be, I discovered the wealth of old light fixtures on eBay and the wonderful new and restored ones that Rejuvenation builds. Take a look at the cutie I just bought from Rejuvenation:

1935 wall fixture with pull chain and new red paint. It will be in the kitchen beside the wood cookstove.

Now if I could only figure out how to add pictures from Flickr to a blog, I’d show all this to you. Edit: Aha! I think I’ve got it! But it certainly wasn’t intuitively obvious …

Index to all my Rejuvenation Projects Blog posts